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    Musing
    Musing
    Musing
    Ebook138 pages1 hour

    Musing

    By Jonathan Locke Hart

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    About this ebook

    Musing is a book of sonnets. Working within the framework of a classic poetic form, Jonathan Locke Hart embarks on an extended meditation on our rootedness in landscape and in the past. As sonnets, the poems are a mixture of tradition and innovation. Throughout, Hart deftly interweaves European culture with North American settings and experience. The collection opens with a foreword by noted literary scholar Gordon Teskey, who reflects on the themes that have marked the evolution of Hart's poetry. Of Musing, Teskey writes: "These deeply thoughtful poems bring layered historical consciousness into the sonnet. They also touch and stir the heart through all its levels."
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAthabasca University Press
    Release dateApr 1, 2011
    ISBN9781926836386
    Musing
    Author

    Jonathan Locke Hart

    Jonathan Locke Hart's poetry has appeared in many prestigious literary journals, and translations of his poems have been published in Estonian, French, and Greek. He teaches at the University of Alberta, and his recent books include Dream China, Dream Salvage, and Dreamwork.

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      Book preview

      Musing - Jonathan Locke Hart

      MUSING

      Mingling Voices

      Series editor: Manijeh Mannani

      Give us wholeness, for we are broken.

      But who are we asking, and why do we ask?

      — Phyllis Webb

      National in scope, Mingling Voices draws on the work of both new and established poets, novelists, and writers of short stories. The series especially, but not exclusively, aims to promote authors who challenge traditions and cultural stereotypes. It is designed to reach a wide variety of readers, both generalists and specialists. Mingling Voices is also open to literary works that delineate the immigrant experience in Canada.

      Series Titles

      Poems for a Small Park

      E.D. Blodgett

      Dreamwork

      Jonathan Locke Hart

      Windfall Apples: Tanka and Kyoka

      Richard Stevenson

      The dust of just beginning

      Don Kerr

      Roy & Me: This Is Not a Memoir

      Maurice Yacowar

      Zeus and the Giant Iced Tea

      Leopold McGinnis

      Praha

      E.D Blodgett

      Musing

      Jonathan Locke Hart

      sonnets by Jonathan Locke Hart

      musing

      WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY GORDON TESKEY

      © 2011 Jonathan Locke Hart

      Published by AU Press, Athabasca University

      1200, 10011 – 109 Street Edmonton, AB T5J 3S8

      ISBN 978-1-897425-90-9 (print)

      978-1-897425-91-6 (pdf)

      978-1-926836-3-86 (epub)

      A volume in the Mingling Voices series:

      ISSN 1917-9405 (print) 1917-9413 electronic)

      Cover and book design by Natalie Olsen, Kisscut Design.

      Cover image by Deborah Elder, Dream Garden (1995).

      Author photo by Manijeh Mannani.

      Printed and bound in Canada by Marquis Book Printing.

      Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

      Hart, Jonathan Locke, 1956–

      Musing / Jonathan Locke Hart.

      (Mingling voices, ISSN 1917-9405)

      Poems.

      Also issued in electronic format.

      ISBN 978-1-897425-90-9

      I. Title. II. Series: Mingling voices

      PS8565.A6656M88 2011 C811’.6 C2011-900872-6

      We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF) for our publishing activities.

      Please contact AU Press, Athabasca University at aupress@athabascau.ca for permissions and copyright information.

      For George and Mary

      Introduction

      THE POETRY OF JONATHAN HART

      Jonathan Locke Hart’s five books of poetry cover writing that extends thirty years, although most of his poems appear to have been written between the early 1990s and the mid-2000s. For their sensitivity to nuances of feeling and their technical care, Hart’s poems resemble those of another master from Alberta, E.D. Blodgett, to whom one of Hart’s books, Dream China (2002), is dedicated. But Hart’s poems are altogether less intimate than Blodgett’s. There is little of Hart’s personal life in them, or of our personal lives, in which we are held to one another by the spiderweb of nearly invisible but exceptionally powerful bonds. Nor is Hart a poet like Simon Armitage, for example, whose imagination is rooted deeply in one place, as in almost all English poets, however much they travel. Although they are always going down lost lanes of Queen Anne’s lace, English poets are never lost themselves. They know where they are and where they come from.

      Hart is different, and in this, I think, intensely Canadian, or even Australian, for Australians are just like Canadians, only more so. Hart has traveled widely, in China and in every major country in Europe. He has lived long periods in China, but also in England, often at its great universities in Oxford, Cambridge, and London. He has also had extended stays in the United States, at Princeton and especially at Harvard, a university with which he has had close personal connections. Trained in history and English literature, a scholar of the European Renaissance and of Shakespeare, and of the history of colonialism, Hart is a creature of the elite university world — his PhD is from Toronto, where he lived in Massey College — but he is also a citizen of the world outside the universities. His poetry is intensely a poetry of place, place known and felt in historical depth; but the places in question are many. His is not a poetry of roots but of mobility.

      One of Hart’s heroes and teachers, Marshall McLuhan, spoke not unfavorably of the rootlessness of modern man in the age of modern communications. Another of Hart’s heroes and teachers, Northrop Frye, influenced by McLuhan’s mentor, Harold Adams Innis, spoke of how Canada, because it is a vast, sparsely populated territory and obsessed, as a result, with communications, is a post-national country just because of this fact. Communications — a transcontinental railway and telegraph, a trans-Canada highway, a growing trade in Canadian books, aircraft, immigration, radio, telecommunications, the Internet — were needed to unite the vast country. But this unifying effort overshot its aim because there was no reason, nor is there now, for communications to stop at national boundaries. Communications, the extensions of man, as McLuhan called them, break through all boundaries whatever and connect us with the world, and with others in the world, sometimes unpleasantly. Paradoxically, in trying to unite and define itself

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